


The Shape You've Grown

by Cerberusia



Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: M/M, Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-18 00:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16106993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerberusia/pseuds/Cerberusia
Summary: The man browsing the dahlia bouquets was a Kritiker operative.





	The Shape You've Grown

The man browsing the dahlia bouquets was a Kritiker operative.

From his place at the till, Omi could only see his back and, when he turned, a hint of his profile; but he'd been raised in Kritiker for as long as he could remember, and he could recognise a fellow assassin when he saw one. There was something about the stance, perhaps, or just the same instinct by which anybody recognises a fellow tradesman.

He considered calling out a friendly shop-greeting, then decided against it. He just watched from under his eyelashes as the man made a show of browsing the store. He was tall, maybe a little over 175 centimetres, Omi estimated, and solidly built under his black coat. No useful identifying features like scars or piercings, but his hair was light and fashionably long, and what little Omi could see of his face suggested that he was handsome, with a straight nose and high cheekbones. He wondered what weapon the man used.

Finally, after the last trailing salaryman had left and the shop was for the moment empty of customers, the man turned and crossed to the counter where Omi was sitting. He was, as Omi had suspected, good-looking. He couldn't tell whether or not the man was armed.

"Afternoon," he said mildly. Perhaps he was going to play innocent customer? Omi considered how fast he could pull out the pair of darts he kept underneath the till, next to the order and account books.

"Good afternoon," he said, with his best customer-serving smile. "How can I help?"

This was clearly the opening the man had been waiting for, because he smiled back.

"I wonder...I'm looking for a guy, name of Fujimiya, about my height, weirdly red hair?" The man waved his hand negligently. "Serious kind of guy, you know. Apparently he works here."

It wasn't the most flattering description of Aya, but it was perfectly recognisable. Omi couldn't claim that the man's information was wrong, because he'd only come back later and discover that Aya did in fact work at the flower shop. But he could stall him and warn Aya that another Kritiker operative was looking for him, and ask him what the hell he'd done.

"You're right, he does." Omi was still addressing the man like a customer. "As you can see, he's not here at the moment. Is there a name I can take? A message?" He paused delicately. "I'd be so interested to hear how you know him, actually." The man was acting like he was looking for a friend; but Aya didn't do friends. None of them did, really.

"Oh, we used to work together," the man was saying carelessly, but before Omi could process that, the door to the back of the shop swung open and out came the man in question - who stopped dead upon catching sight of the stranger.

"Yuushi?" he demanded.

"Hey, Ran, long time no see." The man leaned on the counter and smiled. Aya looked angrier than usual. If he went for the stranger, was Omi obliged to hold him back? And did Aya make a habit of taking girls' names as pseudonyms, or was his name really 'Ran'? Well, Omi supposed he could see the logic in not wanting to be called 'Orchid' when your cover job was floristry.

"Yeah." Flat. "Were you expecting me to ask how you've been?" That, Omi realised, was a flash of what _might_ have been sardonic humour.

"Nah, your manners are as terrible as ever." 'Yuushi' looked even more cheerful. Aya, now that Omi looked at him closely, seemed oddly...relaxed? Omi started to get the inkling that these two actually _liked_ each other. If this was Aya's version of friendly banter, Omi would have to recalibrate how he interpreted his interactions with Ken and Yohji.

"Omi, this is Honjou Yuushi," said Aya, turning to their rapt audience. "We were in the same team for a while." Omi knew, of course, that Aya had spent a few months in Crashers: but Aya himself had never alluded to it. Having read only the bare-bones records of their operations in those months, Omi could guess why.

"That's what I told him - I'm sorry, I never asked your name." Honjou turned to Omi as well, and brough his considerable charm to bear. Omi wasn't even sure it was a conscious effort, or if he just turned on the charm at will, like a tap.

"Tsukiyono Omi. Nice to meet you." He wasn't sure if it was, but it did no harm to be polite to other Kritiker agents. And he, unlike some people in this shop, had _manners_.

"Omi, right...and you, you're going by 'Aya' now? Of all the things..."

Aya, disdaining to elaborate for Omi's curious ears, simply affirmed this.

"That's right. So what have you come for?" Honjou had a point about Aya's manners. That was Type A, all the way.

"Nothing important." Omi didn't believe him for a second, and he didn't think Aya did either. "Can't I come to catch up with an old _teammate_?"

"No." But Aya ceded ground. He looked to Omi, and said: "I'll take him up to mine."

"That's a good idea, Aya-kun." It wasn't entirely: if Honjou really was a threat, he'd only have one person to take down rather than all of them together. But since he hadn't protested that he'd like to meet Aya's new teammates, it looked like he really was here to talk to just Aya.

"Much obliged." Honjou stepped past Omi with another charming smile. "I see you're in charge here. Don't worry, I promise not to keep him up _too_ far past his bed time."

Aya looked as if he would like to say something vulgar in response to that, but he only glared at Honjou as he passed through the door into the back of the shop. Before Aya followed him, he glanced at Omi.

Omi nodded, and Aya slipped out after Honjou, closing the door behind him.

It was then that Omi remembered _why_ Aya had come in originally: he had been about to take over Omi's shift. Omi cursed in his head, but reconciled himself to the fact that Aya was no doubt being told something that would put them all in mortal peril, and it was better they knew about it beforehand.

Throughout the rest of the graveyard shift, Omi wondered what was going on upstairs in Aya's apartment. Honjou could even be gone by now, but even though there was a separate entrance to the rest of the building, using it required one to pass in front of the flowershop to get out onto the main street. Unless Honjou had literally climbed the rooftops to get away, Omi would have seen him.

Which meant that he was still up there. With Aya.

A salaryman with a bad haircut came in wanting a bouquet for his girlfriend, whom Omi guessed to be much younger judging by the picture on the man's phone. Omi sold him a floral explosion of purple and blue, only slightly overpriced, and went back to his schoolwork. He had to keep on top of it, because on mission nights he never had the time.

He locked up after a quiet afternoon faded into a quieter evening. He wiped down the counters, mopped the floor, checked the stock, and put away everything that could conceivably need putting away. The shadows stretched across the empty shop floor like fingers.

Then he went downstairs, into the basement. Past the spare plant pots which didn't fit in the stockroom, into the mission room, to the computer.

He didn't bother searching the internet for 'Honjou Yuushi'. That would only alert Kritiker, and be useless besides. Instead, he brought up a program that no other member of Weiss knew existed: CamSet.

CamSet had various applications, but had originally been conceived of as a video baby monitor. This was not, of course, its purpose on the mission room computer.

Omi had never previously used CamSet, but he knew how it worked. He also knew where the cameras it controlled had been set up in Weiss' apartments. After only a moment's hesitation - because this was what he'd been wrestling with all through his double shift that afternoon - he double-clicked 'F_livrm'.

Up popped a video - a live feed of Aya's living room. Aya and Honjou were both in it. That was good: Omi had still been a little worried that they'd left the building, and then he would have had to go and track them down. But both men were sitting down on Aya's sofa, apparently deep in discussion. Aya didn't look angry or even wary. Omi squinted at the tiny square of video: he thought Aya might actually be _smiling_.

So maybe this guy really was Aya's friend from Crashers? How he'd managed to penetrate Aya's cool veneer, Omi had no idea. It wasn't that Aya was nasty or stuck-up, or even unempathetic: he just deflected friendly overtures like a brick wall deflects stones. Not interested, not acknowledging. But he was certainly acting as if he liked and trusted this guy who'd just turned up out of the blue.

Honjou took hold of Aya's jaw, and even when he leaned in it took Omi several moments to process what was really happening on screen. He stared, uncomprehendingly, at the grainy picture of two men kissing.

He expected Aya to pull away, and either hit Honjou or give him a disdainful stare. But instead Aya leaned into Honjou and put his hand on his thigh. They kept kissing.

When Honjou pinned Aya to the sofa, Omi closed the feed. Honjou could, he supposed, have done that to more effectively cut Aya's throat; but Omi didn't think so.

He sat there in the dark, and wished he weren't blushing. He shouldn't find the notion of his adult teammates engaging in sexual activities embarrassing, and frankly living with Yohji should have inured him to such things entirely - but even though he'd been spying on Aya ostensibly for his own good, he still felt like a voyeur.

It also put him in the uncomfortable situation of knowing something personal about Aya that Aya hadn't meant to reveal. Omi had always assumed that Aya's obvious lack of interest in women was due to him having sublimated all personal desires into a drive for revenge, but it now looked as if it was a matter of inclination. He examined his memories of Aya's behaviour, but there was nothing he could say should have tipped him off earlier. Well, they did say now that you couldn't necessarily tell just by looking at a person or even talking to them - but living with them?

There was no point in wondering about it: he knew _now_. There was nothing to do with the information, really. He could report it to Kritiker, but in the first place it wasn't relevant to their work; and furthermore, Kritiker probably already knew.

Omi turned off the computer and went upstairs to his own apartment. There was always more schoolwork to complete or poison reference manuals to read. Aya's apartment was above his, but no matter how hard he listened, he couldn't hear thumping or scraping or voices. He couldn't decide whether he was grateful for that or not.

The next morning dawned overcast, but with sun through the clouds. Omi woke up early, even though it was Sunday, which was a waste of a school-less morning. He washed and ate breakfast, and then crept downstairs to the shop. Nobody else was up yet, unsurprisingly - Omi was the only morning person among them. Ken would get up with minimal grumbling to coach soccer, Aya would get up for coffee but not be intelligible before he'd drunk it, and Yohji just wouldn't.

The empty shop had a pleasing feel to it this early in the morning, with the occasional shafts of sunlight penetrating the windows. Instead of looking desolate or abandoned, it looked inviting, just waiting for the morning rush. A lily in the corner was out of the light and drooping; Omi gave it some water and fixed its pot so it was sitting in a more favourable position.

Then, since it was still an hour before he had to set up, he went noiselessly down the stairs to the mission room.

It was only to check that Aya hadn't been murdered in the night, he told himself. There was every chance that Honjou had slipped out during the night. There was no guarantee that any of them would have heard his light assassin's footsteps.

The computer seemed to take an age to boot up, even though it was a recent model. Omi clicked on the CamSet application without letting himself think about it.

Aya would be upset if he knew you were spying on him, a reasonable voice in his head pointed out as the program displayed a brief loading screen.

It's for his own good, Omi told himself firmly, and clicked on F_livrm. There was nobody there, perhaps not surprisingly, though there was a book whose title Omi couldn't make out on the table, and a glass on the floor.

He clicked on A_bed and waited for the picture to load. In the second it took, he envisioned at least four different scenarios, alternately gruesome and pornographic.

In the end, it was neither. Honjou obviously hadn't slipped out of the _Koneko_ during the night, because he was right there, in bed with Aya. They both appeared to be asleep, and they clearly weren't wearing any clothes, which were scattered around them on the floor. Nothing else was out of place. That didn't surprise Omi: he could tell when Aya had been doing the books because all the files and notebooks were left at right-angles, perfectly aligned. Aya's floral arrangements, although when pressed he'd admitted that he had done some ikebana (and had thus been assigned to arrange flowers in perpetuity), were meticulous rather than artistic.

Omi felt like a creep, but he watched the live feed for a while. The video quality was too poor to see the rise and fall of their chests, so they simply appeared to be still. Nevertheless, there was something compelling about the picture.

Suddenly, Honjou stirred, rolled over, and flung an arm across Aya. Even through the grainy feed, Omi saw him wake.

He ended the feed as if it had burnt him. He could be missing the moment when Honjou tried to strangle Aya at last - but if he hadn't done it in the night, he was unlikely to try it now. As strange as the whole thing seemed, Omi was forced to the conclusion that Honjou didn't mean to harm Aya. Not directly or immediately, at least. There must be more to Honjou's strange visit than a - a what, a hook-up? - but it looked like he would have to wait until Aya told him or they got a conveniently-timed mission. Their personal lives did have an unfortunate tendency to get tangled up with work.

He went back upstairs to continue setting up the shop, even though there was really nothing more to set up except the sign and a couple of racks of buckets that lived in the store-room at night. But it beat sitting in the basement and thinking about what exactly Honjou and Aya might be up to right now.

Yohji came down to actually open the shop ten minutes before Omi was due to leave for school. He looked tired, to Omi's eyes. The business with Neu or Asuka or whoever she really was had unsettled him. Omi spared a moment to be thoughtful and made him another cup of coffee in the shop's kitchenette before he left.

Whatever was written on his school file, it excused him from virtually all after-school activities, for which he was profoundly grateful. As far as his classmates were concerned, he had a part-time job and no time to socialise, which suited him fine. After all, it was true.

He distracted himself from his useless, circular thoughts by concentrating on lessons. Occasionally in the past few years, he had been overcome by fatalism: what was the point? What was the point of trying for good grades, what was the point of attending school at all, except that it looked odd if he didn't? Why had Kritiker even tried to inculcate in him the habit of scholastic effort and achievement? It wasn't as if he were going to _do_ anything with his grades. Whatever Kritiker's plans for him were, they clearly didn't involve university, unless he was meant to infiltrate a secret society in one.

But it was _normal_ to go to school, _normal_ to have homework, _normal_ to have classmates. It was an anchor to the 'real world', the world and people that Weiss were supposedly fighting to protect. So he attended school and did his homework in quiet periods on shift, and pretended for a few hours that he was normal too. It was relaxing, like a vacation from real life.

When he got back, Aya was on shift. He didn't look different - well, why should he? Aya hardly showed expression on his face. Honjou had been right to describe him as 'a serious kinda guy'. He was far from totally inscrutable, but Omi couldn't tell whether he had more or less tension in his shoulders than yesterday.

Stop it, he told himself firmly, you're being ridiculous about this. He didn't act like this when he knew Yohji had been out.

The difference being, of course, that he knew that Yohji went out. He knew exactly what Yohji did, or could make an educated guess. Prior to yesterday evening, he'd had no clue about Aya.

He pushed through the small crowd of girls and escaped to the back of the shop.

Irritated by his own thoughts, Omi took out his homework and sat in one of the two chairs in the shop's miniscule kitchenette to do it. For an hour, he immersed himself in geography instead of intrusive concerns about his teammates' private lives.

His pleasant reverie on the mechanics of earthquakes came to an end when Ken came through the back room, tying his apron and biting a piece of paper between his teeth.

"Ken-kun, can I-"

But Ken shook his head and hurried past him into the shop. That meant it was either personal (unlikely) or needed in the shop. It had looked rather like a piece of scrap paper - probably with a order or message from a supplier on it. Omi looked up at the clock, and discovered that it was Ken's shift now, anyway. Omi himself had drawn an unfortunate number of closing shifts this week, though it didn't really bother him. It was quiet, and nobody was inconsiderate enough to leave him a mess to clean up or anything like that.

Before he could go up to his own apartment, the door to the shop opened and Aya appeared, carrying a folder and looking fed-up. It _had_ been noisy.

"Coffee?" Omi asked, but Aya was already heading for the cupboard where they kept the coffee pots. When he put the folder down to get one out, its spine revealed that it was the order book. Omi suspected that inside it would be a slightly crumpled piece of scrap paper, possibly still bearing the imprint of Ken's teeth.

Omi waited until Aya had made the coffee before he asked:

"So, your old teammate Honjou...how did it go?"

Aya shrugged.

"He's getting out. Of Kritiker, I mean."

"Out?" Omi, who had never contemplated such a thing, was put on the back foot. "I don't know how well that will go for him..." He didn't want to say _I thought the only way you left Kritiker was in a body bag_ , but he knew they were both thinking it.

"Yes, he intends to take advantage of the current instability in the organisation." _Instability_ , that was a nice way of putting it. "Besides, the person he was protecting through his work has died, so he feels that there's no reason for him to stay in Crashers."

 _Protecting through his work_...a neatly ambiguous phrase. Protecting them with money, or directly through assassination? It wasn't any of Omi's business, but he was curious. He'd joined Weiss out of gratitude to Kritiker and especially to Persia, and he was always curious about the reasons of others. He hadn't _enjoyed_ seeing his teammates' previous lives coming back to haunt them, but he treasured the feeling that at least he knew the guys he lived and worked with a little better.

But then, Aya was protecting his sister through being in Weiss, wasn't he? The rest of them had nobody left to protect, which was a depressing way to think about things.

"I thought that maybe he'd come to give you information about Kritiker, or a mission, or something..." Omi trailed off delicately. He couldn't exactly say _I spied on your apartment in case he'd come to kill you, and accidentally saw him stick his tongue in your mouth instead, sorry_.

But Aya, looking not at Omi but down at his coffee, shook his head.

"Yuushi just came by for...a social call, I guess." He made a face like he couldn't believe anybody would want to come visit him to catch up. It was, Omi had to admit, highly unlikely for one Kritiker agent to visit another without an ulterior motive, even if they had once been on the same team. But Aya, who knew Honjou better than Omi did, looked convinced that he'd come for no other reason than a friendly chat.

Well, Omi thought uncomfortably, there had been rather more than just talking involved. But turning up just for a hook-up also seemed unlikely...but then, what did Omi really know about that? He wished he didn't feel slightly guilty about what he'd accidentally overseen. At least he hadn't just sat there and watched like some kind of voyeur. But the sensation of knowing something about Aya that Aya would never have meant to reveal felt quite intimate, in a way that Omi didn't think Aya would enjoy or approve of. He could't help dwelling on it: he hadn't guessed, despite living and working with the guy, and now he would always hold this piece of sensitive information in the back of his mind when he was wondering why Aya had done something (this was something he wondered a lot).

It was still stupid to be so hung up about it. It was nearly the new millenium, and Omi was a teenaged assassin: he'd seen and done things considerably more shocking. He'd seen Aya do them too. But despite the murderous and often gory nature of their work - on their last mission, Aya had run a man clean through while Ken sank his claws into another man's stomach - tenderness and sensuality had their own shock-value when displayed by a man whose only passion appeared to be anger.

What are you going to do about it? he asked himself. What _can_ you do about it?

Of course, there was nothing to be done about it, that was the ridiculous thing. It wasn't something that ought to be reported to Kritiker - who probably already knew - and Omi was hardly about to start a conversation about it. There was nothing to say, except to tell Aya that he knew, which would only lead to upset.

So he wasn't going to _do_ anything about it Soon enough, he would probably forget what he'd seen beyond a hazy impression. Things were moving fast, these days. Soon enough, he would stop thinking of what must have happened between Aya and Honjou whenever Aya took off his sweater or bent his white neck over a flower arrangement. He might even grow out of wanting Aya's approval, which he wished weren't quite so noticeable. In short, the whole incident would become as insignificant as it ought to be in Omi's mind.

**Author's Note:**

> What my id really wants for WK right now: other members of Weiss or Side B realising that Aya is gay. Just that scenario, with slightly different flavourings, repeated over and over. I can't get enough of it. My own subconscious still has the power to surprise me.


End file.
